As long as I can see, the most important missing element is a location (aka “positioning”) engine able to work with the high precision required by indoor applications.
These days I’m working at a commercial project aimed to develop an indoor navigation system for shopping centers and, with my great pleasure, I discovered that the OSM world is already able to supply most, if not all, of the elements required by this kind of applications. Most likely, we will not use OSM or other Open Source components because of our upstream legal/copyright constrains but I’m still impressed by the amount and the quality of the code produced by this community.
So far, I have seen a few good map editors (Potlach, Merkaartor, etc.), a few impressive server-side applications for serving tiles, maps and other things and even a couple of very impressive routing engine like OSRM (the Open Source Routing Machine) and OpenTripPlanner.
The only missing element is something like WiFiSlam, Navizon o Skyhook. That is: a working, actively-maintained, easy-to-deploy location engine able to locate the end user’s device indoor with an accuracy of 2 - 4 meters (“room-level accuracy”). As an alternative, this element could (or should?) be implemented as a public webservice (even a commercial one).
Of course, I’m aware of Redpin and FootPath. I have their source trees on my hard disk and I’m studying them. Unfortunately, both of these projects seems to be quite abandoned (last commit a year ago or more) and their Android clients are available only as source code (they both require a determined, well-prepared sysadmin/developer to be compiled and deployed). In their current incarnation, they can hardly be considered a working solution to this problem.
I wonder if this (apparent?) lack of interest is related to the imminent arrival of the Broadcom BCM4752 GPS chipset on the smartphone market. Is the community just waiting for a COTS, built-in, hardware solution to this problem? (Just asking, out of curiousity)
Hoping not having hurt anybody…